This seems like a very complicated way to achieve your goal! It sounds like sitting yourself down and giving you a stern talking to might be a beter aporoach.

Having said that, if you have these very important files that you don’t want to lose, please make sure they’re backed up somewhere off of your machine. Storage fails, and it’s a horrible feeling losing something important. Unfortunately doing so would defeat the approach you’re thinking of.

This might be a case of needing to reframe the question to get to the cause of the issue, and then solve that. So, why do you want to make it hard to reinstall your machine? Is it the amount of time you spend on it, the chance of screwing it up, needing it working, has it become a compulsion or something else? Maybe if we can get to the root of the issue we can find a solution.

With regard to TPM, it’s basically just a key store, so you can use it fir anything really, althought it’s normally used by generating a TPM key and using it to encrypt the key that’s actually used to encrypt your data, storing the encrypted key with the OS. Just reinstalling won’t wipe the TPM, but unless you made an effort to save the encrypted key it’ll be gone. Given your problem statement above it just adds to the data you’d need to save, which isn’t helpful.

Ok, I’m still not clear on exactly what you’re trying to achieve as I can’t quite see the connection between somehow preventing certain files being duplicated when cloning the disk and preventing yourself from reinstalling the system.

Bear in mind that reinstalling the system would replace all of the OS, so there’s no way to leave counter-measures there, and the disk itself can’t do anything to your data, even if it could detect a clone operation.

If what you’re trying to protect against is someone who knows everything you do accessing your data, you could look to use TPM to store the encryption key for your FDE. That way you don’t know the password, it’s stored encrypted with a secret key that is, in turn, stored and protected by your CPU. That way a disk clone couldn’t be used on any hardware except your specific machine.

Nothing can prevent a disk clone cloning the data, and there’s no way to make something happen when a disk is cloned as you’re not in control of the process.

If you wish to mask the existence of the files, use either full disk encryption, in which case cloning the disk doesn’t reveal the existence of the files without the decrypt password, or use a file based encrypted partition such as veracrypt in which case the cloner would just see a single encrypted blob rather than your file names.

Ultimately encrypting the files with gpg means they have already effectively ‘destroyed or corrupted’ themselves when cloned. If you don’t want to reveal the filenames, just call them something else.

If you could be a bit more specific about your threat model people may have better ideas to help.

It sounds like you’re actually more concerned about the data in the files not being able to ‘pop up’ elsewhere, rather than the files themselves. In thus case I’d suggest simply encrypting them, probably using gpg. That’ll let you set a password that is distinct from the one used for sudo or similar.

You should also be using full disk encryption to reduce the risk of a temporary file being exposed, or even overwritten sectors/pages being available to an attacker.

It looks like AssDB uses a weird SQL syntax? Is it worth upgrading to, I hear it’s great at pulling information out of unstructured and even imaginary data sources?

Ah, memories. That was me on a Spectrum. It’s all fun and games until you forget to save (to tape) and your code hangs the machine, losing everything.

Putting a simple preseed file on a debian install image is probably going to be your best bet. Assuming you can run a VM on your current machine it shouldn’t be too difficult to test it until you’re happy with it.

It’s going to be a balance between your time getting an automated approach to work and the cost/effort of getting a monitor. Getting preseed working can be a bit fiddly, but it does mean you’ve learnt a new skill, getting a monitor sounds like it’ll be a pain, and you might only need it once.

Yes, that’ll work too, it does involve adding the disk to your machine temporarily though, so just be carefully which disk you format to do it. Please don’t ask why I say that, it brings back painful memories…

While I agree with most people here that finding a keyboard and screen would be the easiest option, you do have a couple of other options:

• Use a preseed file A preseed lets the installer run completely automatically, without user intervention. Get it to install a basic system with SSH and take it from there. You’ll want to test the install in a VM, where you can see what’s going on before letting it run on the real server. More information here: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed

• Boot from a live image with SSH Take a look at https://wiki.debian.org/LiveCD in particular ‘Debian Live’. It looks like ssh is included, but you’d want to check the service comes up on boot. You can then SSH to the machine and install to the harddrive that way. Again, test on a VM until you know you have the image working, and know how to run the install, then write it to a USB key and boot the tsrget server from that.

This all assumes the target server has USB or CD at the top of its boot order. If it doesn’t you’ll have to change that first, either with a keyboard and screen, or via a remote management interface sych as IPMI.

I believe so, but that’s definitely something you’d need to check yourself.

You shouldn’t need a window manager, you should be able to pass a tell mpv to just run full screen.

Alternativly, if you’re up for a bit more work, it looks like you can get mpv to run in tge framebuffer and so not need ecen X11. It might take recompiling a few packages, I’m not sure whether the options are built by default now, but you could have a look at this thread fir example: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=176072

I’m not disputing that he doesn’t think the issues are major, as I said, he’s usually pretty ambivalent about what runs on the kernel, so they’re not issues he cares about. On the flip side, I do care what is running because I have to manage and support it.

I do wonder if we’re talking at cross purposes though. You seem to mostly be talking about the systemd init system, I’m mostly talking about all the other bits it, as a sort of umbrella project, tries to encompass. I don’t much like the init system, I prefer to be able to explicitly set the ordering of the steps, rather than having them inferred, and I prefer shell script that I can test to unit files, but it mostly works ok. So does every other init system though, so it’s not a selling point.

As I said, the big problem is around how they’ve tried to do everything, much of it less well than what they’re replacing. Yes, you can build a system that uses systemd-init and none of the other components, but that still drags in a load of other dependencies, so you might as well use a different init that’s smaller and cleaner.

We came close to the ‘systemd apocalypse’ recently, when distros hooked the systemd library into openssh without understanding just how bloated it is and how many poorly monitored dependencies it brought in. It was just luck that the right person spotted a slight change in timing and investigated.

Ultimately I suppose it comes down to the level you interact with your systems at. If you just want to install your OS, a few packages they directly support and let it get on with it, then you probably neither know nor care that you run systemd, and that’s great. On the other hand, in my experience, when you try to push the system past that and do anything more customized you start running into the sharp edges and misfeatures on the various systemd components.

I obviously find the arguments against systemd more persuasive than you do, and that’s fine, it’s all open source and we can all make our own choices about it. My experience with it over the years has been, and still is that it vastly over complicates things that used to be simple, often the less commonly used parts just don’t work right (the automounter is a particular bugbear of mine, and few distros seem to use the network management component). The arguments do matter in practical terms as they directly impact how it works.

Of the distros you mentioned, centos is a RHEL derivative and so wasn’t independent, arch packages multiple init systems, but yes, I’d forgotten opensuse, and they seem to be firmly in the systemd camp.

I may be an internet rando, but I’m not actually angry, more just disappointed. I’d agree with Mr Torvald’s opinion that some of the design details are insane, but I think they are more fundamental than just ‘details’ as many are to do with the fundamental concepts around what systemd is and how it works. Linus can be a real dragon around changes to the kernel, but he’s always tended to be more relaxed about the layers above it.

That the developers of systemd are ‘much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility’ is surely clear to anyone who follows the relevant mailing lists and bug trackers, and should alarm everyone.

Let’s agree to disagree on that point. Redhat switched because they invented it, and so took all the RHEL derivative distros with them. Debian switched to prefer it after a rather contentious vote and so took all the Debian derivative distros, including Ubuntu, with them. That just leaves a lot of the smaller distros, most of which seem to have stuck with sysvinit or similar as far as I can see.

Probably not much time, a lot of packages come with init scripts anyway, and they’re pretty trivial to write if not.

You can certainly argue it’s a philosophical choice, I’d say it’s more down to recognising the many poor architectural choices in systemd, rubbing agaist its many pain points and misfeatures and being alarmed at the size of the attack surface it exposes. I understand there is an effort underway to reduce the size and complexity of the main shared library to help address the last point, but just the fact that is necessary shows the scope of the problem.

They seem to. Debian explicitly supports multiple init systems, sysvinit being the primary alternative, so packages have to handle systemd-init not being there.

Debian works fine without systemd too, there’s a page on the wiki on how to install without it, or remove it after the fact.

If you don’t need external calling you don’t need a trunk, it’s just for connecting to the outside world. I found [[https://www.asterisk.org/|Asterisk]] was a good place to start. The config is rather involved though, so there are various front ends for it.

You can, but I found it a bit laggy. It basically wraps your tcp stream over https, so I think the extra overhead was what was slowing it down.